


Fearful Symmetry

by hopeless_eccentric



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Angst, Character Study, Hurt No Comfort, Implied Sexual Content, Mentioned Character Death, Other, Post-Episode: s01e18 Juno Steel and the Final Resting Place, Self-Hatred, betrayal and heartbreak and whatnot, essentially a long breakdown of everything left unsaid in the doorway, this hurt a lot to write i hope you all enjoy it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:02:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25852564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hopeless_eccentric/pseuds/hopeless_eccentric
Summary: Sleep still clings to Nureyev like a desperate lover, weighing on his bones as the sunken mattress around him threatens to swallow him whole. Sleep grasps at him like a crawling ivy and beckons him to return, though the newborn rise of bile in his throat denies its begging persuasion.He is, on technicality, awake. However, his exhaustion grants him a small kindness in its presence. Nureyev can pretend the shifting of the mattress was merely some cruel dream, and perhaps, Juno still lies inches away. The shadow in the door must be that of a stranger.
Relationships: Peter Nureyev/Juno Steel
Comments: 16
Kudos: 31





	Fearful Symmetry

**Author's Note:**

> Title from The Tyger by William Blake
> 
> Content warnings for mentions of blood, mentions of death, some minor metaphorical gore, betrayal, self-hatred

There’s a shadow in the doorway, and Peter Nureyev doesn’t know whose it is. 

Sleep still clings to him like a desperate lover, weighing on his bones as the sunken mattress around him threatens to swallow him whole. Sleep grasps at him like a crawling ivy and beckons him to return, though the newborn rise of bile in his throat denies its begging persuasion. 

He is, on technicality, awake. However, his exhaustion grants him a small kindness in its presence. Nureyev can pretend the shifting of the mattress was merely some cruel dream, and perhaps, Juno still lies inches away. The shadow in the door must be that of a stranger. 

Juno did not hold him when he fell asleep the first time that night. Nureyev fears now those few short hours of rest might be his only for some time, if his senses are not fabricating some ghastly vision of Juno in the doorway. 

However, there is a single fact he cannot ignore, no matter how much denial attempts to cradle his mind away from such brutal realities. His arm is bared to the harsh cold of the hotel air conditioner where it was well covered mere hours ago. 

The sheets had not moved of their own accord. 

Nureyev was tired when he went to bed. It was not a tiredness in the sense of dark circles and oversteeped black tea, but rather a sated, buzzing tiredness with a comforting kind of weight, like the close-by form of a partner. It was a tiredness he was glad to give way to in the way one burrows under a weighted blanket for comfort or releases a sigh upon embracing. 

It was a soft kind of tiredness, and he welcomed it with open arms. Seldom did he sleep without an eye open, and when given the chance to do so with a loved one so close, he would be loath to part with such an opportunity. 

Now, with his still-blinking eyes trailing between the half-empty bed and this spectre in the doorway, a different kind of exhaustion settles in. 

This fiend does not whisper sweet nothings or smell of gentle sleep. It is not even a standard exhaustion that is staved away with time and activity and the occasional cup of coffee. 

It is cruel and bone deep. Like its sisters, it is accompanied by a kind of weight. However, this exhaustion traps its prey motionless without hope of sleep. Unlike its sisters, this exhaustion is tied to a single moment, in which something deep within the chest cavity rots. 

It plunges a single, filthy hand into the cavity of one’s chest and twists, yet numbs the victim all the way through. Vaguely, they are aware of the pain. Vaguely, they are aware that soon, they must stitch together the pieces of themselves and start anew.

They cannot find it in themself to care, however. They are too tired. 

There are a million things Nureyev wants to say, but all of them catch in his throat. They burn and dance across the tip of his tongue, but all are silenced time and time again. 

He has never seen a future so succinctly killed than by the image before him. The light is low, and as such, the shape could be a million things. Perhaps a bloodstain, blossomed from the wound that cut a young person’s life short. Perhaps an inkblot ruining a marriage certificate. 

Nureyev can squint as much as he likes, but the stranger before him will never be anyone except for Juno Steel, who, hours earlier, whispered sweet, meaningless nothings about an endless future and a brave new world they would face hand and hand. As much as he wants to pretend otherwise, Juno Steel, who had pressed honeyed lies into his hair in between kisses, is the shadow at the door. 

He can try to separate the stranger who lulled him to sleep with saccharine falsities from the person who saved his life time and time again in the last few weeks, but the longer he thinks about it, the more the lines between the stranger at the door and the stranger in the bed and the person Peter Nureyev thought he knew blur. They are all one and the same. 

Nureyev couldn’t change that if he wanted to. 

Perhaps he is desperate. Perhaps he is scared. Perhaps he is gasping the way so many do right before death, clinging to the last threads of life and air and begging they return. 

The reality of it is simple, however. The loss of touch and the shifting of the mattress register in the knot in his stomach far before it will ever register in his head.

So, confused and terrified and mulling over a thousand excuses in his head, he breathes a single word. 

“Juno?”

. . . 

Those two syllables will ring in Juno’s ears for months on end, immune to time and alcohol and the lips of another on his neck. 

His eyes have already adjusted to the city lights when Nureyev speaks, and though he tries to pretend it was all some cruel trick of imagination, his neck turns before his mind can reject his senses altogether. 

Perhaps it is just easier to pretend Nureyev was asleep, and that when he does wake, he might be well rested and more prepared to deal with the smoking hole in his life that Juno Steel has torn. Perhaps it is easier to pretend the sound was a car going by or a whistle of too-loud music from a distant stereo. Perhaps, he can even pretend that Nureyev expected this all along. 

He’s not unintelligent, certainly not to such an extent that he might think Juno would actually deserve the future he described. Juno only wished Nureyev didn’t have to be the one caught in the crossfires. 

Juno couldn’t change that if he wanted to. 

Hours ago, Juno held him close and whispered sweet promises into his hair. He clung to him just to feel that foreign pulse through skin on skin and just to know the man he had made the mistake of trusting and though he won’t admit it for months, even loving, was alive. 

Juno’s hands still lingered, even as a soft and docile sleep overtook Nureyev, who murmured something about love that Juno could not hear over the buzzing static in his own head. 

Looking down at him, blissful and beautiful, bared canines seeming softer in the gray semi-darkness, Juno felt nearly sick. 

Nureyev had gone to bed with sweet dreams of a million tomorrows and endless sunrises over an ever-expanding universe. In this perfect world, he would face every day hand in hand with Juno Steel. 

They spoke a thousand words in their touches, whether they be lips on lips or intertwined hands. When they could not find it in themselves to say much more than names and hushed affirmations, they held one another tight and hoped that would convey what they were too overcome to put into words. 

Nureyev’s touch had been one of hope. It was a message of a bright future, a blood-oath, a wedding vow. His fatal mistake was in misinterpreting Juno’s response. 

Nureyev’s unspoken message was one of soft and tender consummation. Juno was saying goodbye. 

He can try to justify this. Hyperion City has one of the most impressive crime rates in the Solar System, and it deserves someone to defend it who isn’t corrupt. There is still more he can do in a place like this, even if just waking up to that same old sunrise leaves a daily ache in his bones. 

There’s a simpler truth, however, and it sits quietly behind the parade of excuses, waiting for them to march by as Juno stands frozen to the spot. 

Juno Steel does not deserve Peter Nureyev, and will never do so. It is kindest, he thinks, to rip the bandaid away before either of them can become too invested and get hurt. 

Hell of a job he’s done with that. 

He wants, more than anything in the world right now, to run, but there is something cold and malicious that settles into his bones. It aches and bites like the chill of the Martian desert by night, a silent, brutal throb that calls itself exhaustion but is crueler than any lack of sleep. 

Juno knows he won’t sleep tonight. He couldn’t when he was watching Nureyev drift off, and he won’t be able to after this. 

He wonders if he’ll ever sleep soundly again when for a horrible, hour-long second, he catches Nureyev’s eye. 

Even in that Martian tomb, Nureyev had the nerve to look put together, at least to some extent. Retaining his dignity in appearance seemed as important as retaining his hold on reality. Even aching and tortured, breath knocked away and mind unwillingly pried open, he looked far more defiant than tired. 

Perhaps it is but the lighting, or the shadow of this stranger in the door, but a pair of dark circles haunt that newly ashen face and Juno feels as if they have bored into his chest cavity and ripped out something fundamental. 

He looks far more tired than he ever did falling asleep mere inches from Juno. 

In a kinder world, where he didn’t recognize his denial the moment it bloomed from his brain like a bloodstain from a wound, he might have pretended it was a stranger who stood in that door and shattered the man Juno loved. 

Juno’s curse has always been knowing himself, he supposes. 

Like the many who have come before, Juno has been a falling star, colliding into his partner’s life and leaving behind a flaming, smoking hole where some happier version of themselves used to live. The shadow of the person in the door is the shadow of this pattern. It is the shadow of dead loved ones caught in the crosshairs. It is the shadow of Benten’s grave on sunny afternoons. 

There’s a shadow in the doorway, and Juno Steel knows exactly whose it is.

He shuts the door behind him and steps into the city’s noxious midnight glow.

**Author's Note:**

> Man that made me sad. Sorry?
> 
> Thank you all so much for reading! Make sure to smash that kudos button and leave a comment or I'll think mean thoughts about you!!
> 
> Yell at me on tumblr @hopeless-eccentric!!


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